Religion on an Ordinary Day in Quebec: Cultural Christianity, “Threatening” Islam and the Supernatural Marketplace
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Is there such a thing as an “ordinary day”? Through the content analysis of four newspapers from the province of Quebec, Canada, for September 17, 2013, 2014 and 2015, we notice that religion and magic find a way to permeate not only news coverage, but also the less glamorous parts of newspapers such as obituaries and classified advertisements, making the content somewhat “extraordinary”. Christianity is an important topic of discussion throughout all three years, both implicitly and explicitly, because of the Catholic history of Quebec. Islam is also very present in 2013–2015 because of major political debates about laïcité and religious symbols as well as international events involving Islamic extremism and the fear of terrorism. Finally, we find that magic is also on display, mainly through classifieds advertisements for supernatural services, which shows that conventional religion still tends to dominate the news, while magic slips through the crevasses of the less glamorous sections of the papers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".